A passive optical network (PON) is one system for providing network access over “the last mile”. PON may be a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) network with passive splitters positioned in an optical distribution network (ODN) to enable a single feeding fiber from a central office to serve multiple customer premises. PON may employ different wavelengths for upstream and downstream transmissions. Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) is a PON standard developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and specified in IEEE documents 802.3ah and 802.3av, both of which are incorporated herein by reference.
There may be a rising demand which supports the use of EPON as an access system to interconnect with multiple coaxial cables to connect Customer Premises Equipment (CPEs) located in the subscribers' homes with an Ethernet PON over Coaxial (EPoC) architecture. In an EPON or an EPoC network, downstream traffic may be broadcast to customer premises, while upstream bandwidths may be shared among multiple customer premises. An upstream scheduler may consider a network round trip time (RTT) delay when assigning upstream transmission times.